Echoing the objectives of campaigns past, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation has set its goals for an upcoming advertising drive to lure Massachusetts-based companies and employees to Rhode Island.
“Our main thrust is business attraction,” said Clare Eckert, spokesperson for the EDC. “We want to continue to diversify our economy through targeting business sectors that make the most sense or are the best match for Rhode Island.”
Eckert said the sectors the group plans to target in its campaign, set to launch within the next couple months, include biopharmaceutical, financial services, and precision manufacturing in the Bay State. All are industries intertwined with high technology, which was the thrust of the EDC’s 1999 “mass-exodus” campaign – an effort to bring more high-tech companies into the state.
“It’s hard to define high technology in 2002, because everything that will be the future of the economy is in the realm of high technology now,” she said. “Whether it’s service call centers, research and development on new drugs, registering for a class, or checking out food at your local supermarket, it’s all high technology.”
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She said this is why a direct extension of mass-exodus, a $100,000 campaign that helped lure four out-of-state technology companies to Rhode Island, would not work.
Eckert said that although mass-exodus did not establish Rhode Island as a technology hub, she thinks it was successful nevertheless.
“The campaign drew national attention,” she said. “Advertising and promotion are certainly quantifiable, but when you raise an idea, a suggestion or a concept to a level that people are thinking about it, it is very valuable, and sometimes in that regard they’re not quantifiable.”
Joseph Paolino, Jr., Providence’s mayor from 1984 to 1991, knows about these things. Paolino, the man who once said he’d like to see Providence become kind of like the baby brother of Boston, waged a $300,000 campaign to try to get Massachusetts residents and businesses to move to Providence as early as 1986. The campaign included a billboard on the Southeast Expressway that stated, “The reasons for moving to Providence seem endless.”
Paolino’s leadership brought out of state businesses as AT&T and American Express opened offices here. Currently a managing partner of downtown property management firm Paolino Properties, Paolino agreed that the success of an endeavor to attract out-of-state companies and organizations is not necessarily measured by how many people or how many companies actually come.
“You don’t put a billboard up to get people to move into your city, you do it to start conversation,” he said. “What it does is start momentum.”
